Thrust: A Novel

My cousin, my Eros, my confidante,

Your postcard has arrested my sleep, given me a kind of fever. But you knew it would. You are indeed a profound seductress — I am reading the Mary Shelley book and now I have opened the mail and the postcard too. Do you mean to kill me with this strange, erotic, morbid excess? Or just to haunt me? Dead women and monsters brought to life at the hands of a girl… you call images like Medusa to my mind’s eye. You make me want to go back and look to see if we’ve got the story all wrong. You make me want to fashion a colossus that shoots flames from between her legs.

And, my god, how could I have missed the opportunity in front of me: a child of the city! A prostitute! What an incredible turn in my imagination you have engendered. This statue must carry something of the heat and thrust of cities.

Have you read any of the Darwin? A deal’s a deal, my love.

Did you know Darwin married his cousin?

Yours and only yours,

Frédéric

My accidental idiot cousin,

Do me a favor, will you? Slap your own face as hard as you can. Hard enough to leave a mark.

No, I am not trying to conjure some metaphysical vixen in your head. I had no intention of planting a prostitute in your visions. Where in god’s realm did you get the idea?

I feel nothing but rage with regard to your colossal misinterpretation. I feel I could break a man into pieces just to think of it — to rearrange him so that his head is up his own ass.

How comic. You hear my vision, and it takes for you the shape of some voluptuous whore? For male consumption?

You go from mother to virgin to whore? Could you be more dull-witted?

I must calm myself. I shall return to this letter when I can.